Fences and Windows Read online

  All these fences are connected: the real ones, made of steel and razor wire, are needed to enforce the virtual ones, the ones that put resources and wealth out of the hands of so many. It simply isn’t possible to lock away this much of our collective wealth without an accompanying strategy to control popular unrest and mobility. Security firms do their biggest business in the cities where the gap between rich and poor is greatest—Johannesburg, São Paulo, New Delhi—selling iron gates, armoured cars, elaborate alarm systems and renting out armies of private guards. Brazilians, for instance, spend US$4.5 billion a year on private security, and the country’s 400,000 armed rent-a-cops outnumber actual police officers by almost four to one. In deeply divided South Africa, annual spending on private security has reached US$1.6 billion, more than three times what the government spends each year on affordable housing. It now seems that these gated compounds protecting the haves from the have-nots are microcosms of what is fast becoming a global security state—not a global village intent on lowering walls and barriers, as we were promised, but a network of fortresses connected by highly militarized trade corridors.

  If this picture seems extreme, it may only be because most of us in the West rarely see the fences and the artillery. The gated factories and refugee detention centres remain tucked away in remote places, less able to pose a direct challenge to the seductive rhetoric of the borderless world. But over the past few years, some fences have intruded into full view—often, fittingly, during the summits where this brutal model of globalization is advanced. It is now taken for granted that if world leaders want to get together to discuss a new trade deal, they will need to build a modern-day fortress to protect themselves from public rage, complete with armoured tanks, tear gas, water cannons and attack dogs. When Quebec City hosted the Summit of the Americas in April 2001, the Canadian government took the unprecedented step of building a cage around, not just the conference centre, but the downtown core, forcing residents to show official documentation to get to their homes and workplaces. Another popular strategy is to hold the summits in inaccessible locations: the 2002 G8 meeting was held deep in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and the 2001 WTO meeting took place in the repressive Gulf State of Qatar, where the emir bans political protests. The “war on terrorism” has become yet another fence to hide behind, used by summit organizers to explain why public shows of dissent just won’t be possible this time around or, worse, to draw threatening parallels between legitimate protesters and terrorists bent on destruction.

  But what are reported as menacing confrontations are often joyous events, as much experiments in alternative ways of organizing societies as criticisms of existing models. The first time I participated in one of these counter-summits, I remember having the distinct feeling that some sort of political portal was opening up—a gateway, a window, “a crack in history,” to use Subcomandante Marcos’s beautiful phrase. This opening had little to do with the broken window at the local McDonald’s, the image so favoured by television cameras; it was something else: a sense of possibility, a blast of fresh air, oxygen rushing to the brain. These protests—which are actually week-long marathons of intense education on global politics, late-night strategy sessions in six-way simultaneous translation, festivals of music and street theatre—are like stepping into a parallel universe. Overnight, the site is transformed into a kind of alternative global city where urgency replaces resignation, corporate logos need armed guards, people usurp cars, art is everywhere, strangers talk to each other, and the prospect of a radical change in political course does not seem like an odd and anachronistic idea but the most logical thought in the world.

  Even the heavy-handed security measures have been co-opted by activists into part of the message: the fences that surround the summits become metaphors for an economic model that exiles billions to poverty and exclusion. Confrontations are staged at the fence—but not only the ones involving sticks and bricks: tear-gas canisters have been flicked back with hockey sticks, water cannons have been irreverently challenged with toy water pistols and buzzing helicopters mocked with swarms of paper airplanes. During the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, a group of activists built a medieval-style wooden catapult, wheeled it up to the three-metre-high fence that enclosed the downtown and lofted teddy bears over the top. In Prague, during a meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the Italian direct-action group Tute Bianche decided not to confront the black-clad riot police dressed in similarly threatening ski masks and bandanas; instead, they marched to the police line in white jumpsuits stuffed with rubber tires and Styrofoam padding. In a standoff between Darth Vader and an army of Michelin Men, the police couldn’t win. Meanwhile, in another part of the city, the steep hillside leading up to the conference centre was scaled by a band of “pink fairies” dressed in burlesque wigs, silver-and-pink evening wear and platform shoes. These activists are quite serious in their desire to disrupt the current economic order, but their tactics reflect a dogged refusal to engage in classic power struggles: their goal, which I began to explore in the final pieces in this book, is not to take power for themselves but to challenge power centralization on principle.

  Other kinds of windows are opening as well, quiet conspiracies to reclaim privatized spaces and assets for public use. Maybe it’s students kicking ads out of their classrooms, or swapping music on-line, or setting up independent media centres with free software. Maybe it’s Thai peasants planting organic vegetables on over-irrigated golf courses, or landless farmers in Brazil cutting down fences around unused lands and turning them into farming co-operatives. Maybe it’s Bolivian workers reversing the privatization of their water supply, or South African township residents reconnecting their neighbours’ electricity under the slogan Power to the People. And once reclaimed, these spaces are also being remade. In neighbourhood assemblies, at city councils, in independent media centres, in community-run forests and farms, a new culture of vibrant direct democracy is emerging, one that is fuelled and strengthened by direct participation, not dampened and discouraged by passive spectatorship.

  Despite all the attempts at privatization, it turns out that there are some things that don’t want to be owned. Music, water, seeds, electricity, ideas—they keep bursting out of the confines erected around them. They have a natural resistance to enclosure, a tendency to escape, to cross-pollinate, to flow through fences, and flee out open windows.

  As I write this, it’s not clear what will emerge from these liberated spaces, or if what emerges will be hardy enough to withstand the mounting attacks from the police and military, as the line between terrorist and activist is deliberately blurred. The question of what comes next preoccupies me, as it does everyone else who has been part of building this international movement. But this book is not an attempt to answer that question. It simply offers a view into the early life of the movement that exploded in Seattle and has evolved through the events of September 11 and its aftermath. I decided not to rewrite these articles, beyond a few very slight changes, usually indicated by square brackets— a reference explained, an argument expanded. They are presented here (more or less in chronological order) for what they are: postcards from dramatic moments in time, a record of the first chapter in a very old and recurring story, the one about people pushing up against the barriers that try to contain them, opening up windows, breathing deeply, tasting freedom.

  I

  WINDOWS OF DISSENT

  In which activists take down the first fences—

  on the streets and in their minds

  Seattle

  The coming-out party of a movement

  December 1999

  “Who are these people?” That is the question being asked across the United States this week, on radio call-in shows, on editorial pages and, most of all, in the hallways of the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.

  Until very recently, trade negotiations were genteel, experts-only affairs. There weren’t protesters outside, let alone protesters dressed as giant sea turtles. But this week’s WTO meeting is anything but genteel: a state of emergency has been declared in Seattle, the streets look like a war zone and the negotiations have collapsed.

  There are plenty of theories floating around about the mysterious identities of the fifty thousand activists in Seattle. Some claim they are wannabe radicals with sixties envy. Or anarchists bent only on destruction. Or Luddites fighting against a tide of globalization that has already swamped them. Michael Moore, the director of the WTO, describes his opponents as nothing more than selfish protectionists determined to hurt the world’s poor.

  Some confusion about the protesters’ political goals is understandable. This is the first political movement born of the chaotic pathways of the Internet. Within its ranks, there is no top-down hierarchy ready to explain the master plan, no universally recognized leaders giving easy sound bites, and nobody knows what is going to happen next.

  But one thing is certain: the protesters in Seattle are not anti-globalization; they have been bitten by the globalization bug as surely as the trade lawyers inside the official meetings. Rather, if this new movement is “anti” anything, it is anti-corporate, opposing the logic that what’s good for business—less regulation, more mobility, more access—will trickle down into good news for everybody else.

  The movement’s roots are in campaigns that challenge this logic by focusing on the dismal human rights, labour and ecological records of a handful of multinational companies. Many of the young people on the streets of Seattle this week cut their activist teeth campaigning against Nike’s sweatshops, or Royal Dutch/Shell’s human rights record in the Niger Delta, or Monsanto’s re-engineering of the global food supply. Over the past three years, these individual corporations have become symbols of the failings of the global economy, ultimately providing activists with name-brand entry points to the arcane world of the WTO.

  By focusing on global corporations and their impact around the world, this activist network is fast becoming the most internationally minded, globally linked movement ever seen. There are no more faceless Mexicans or Chinese workers stealing “our” jobs, in part because those workers’ representatives are now on the same e-mail lists and at the same conferences as the Western activists, and many even travelled to Seattle to join the demonstrations this week. When protesters shout about the evils of globalization, most are not calling for a return to narrow nationalism but for the borders of globalization to be expanded, for trade to be linked to labour rights, environmental protection and democracy.

  This is what sets the young protesters in Seattle apart from their sixties predecessors. In the age of Woodstock, refusing to play by state and school rules was regarded as a political act in itself. Now, opponents of the WTO—even many who call themselves anarchists—are outraged about a lack of rules being applied to corporations, as well as the flagrant double standards in the application of existing rules in rich or poor countries.

  They came to Seattle because they found out that WTO tribunals were overturning environmental laws protecting endangered species because the laws, apparently, were unfair trade barriers. Or they learned that France’s decision to ban hormone-laced beef was deemed by the WTO to be unacceptable interference with the free market. What is on trial in Seattle is not trade or globalization but the global attack on the right of citizens to set rules that protect people and the planet.

  Everyone, of course, claims to be all for rules, from President Clinton to Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates. In an odd turn of events, the need for “rules-based trade” has become the mantra of the era of deregulation. But the WTO has consistently sought to sever trade, quite unnaturally, from everything and everyone affected by it: workers, the environment, culture. This is why President Clinton’s suggestion yesterday that the rift between the protesters and the delegates can be smoothed over with small compromises and consultation is so misguided.

  The faceoff is not between globalizers and protectionists but between two radically different visions of globalization. One has had a monopoly for the past ten years. The other just had its coming-out party.

  Washington, D.C.

  Capitalism comes out of the closet

  April 2000

  BEFORE

  My friend Mez is getting on a bus to Washington, D.C., on Saturday. I asked him why. He said with great intensity, “Look, I missed Seattle. There’s no way I’m missing Washington.”

  I’d heard people speak with that kind of unrestrained longing before, but the object of their affection was usually a muddy music festival or a short-run New York play like The Vagina Monologues. I’ve never heard anyone talk that way about a political protest. Especially not a protest against groaner bureaucracies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. And certainly not when they are being called on the carpet for nothing sexier than a decades-old loan policy called “structural adjustment.”

  And yet there they are: university students and artists and wage-free anarchists and lunch-box steelworkers, piling onto buses from all corners of the continent. Stuffed in their pockets and shoulder bags are fact sheets about the ratio of spending on health care to debt repayment in Mozambique (two and a half times more for debt) and the number of people worldwide living without electricity (two billion).

  Four months ago, this same coalition of environmental, labour and anarchist groups brought a World Trade Organization meeting to a standstill. In Seattle, an impressive range of single-issue campaigns—some focused on controversial corporations such as Nike or Shell, some on dictatorships such as Burma—broadened their focus to a more structural critique of the regulatory bodies playing referee in a global race to the bottom.

  Caught off guard by the strength and organization of the opposition, the proponents of accelerated free trade immediately went on the offensive, attacking the protesters as enemies of the poor. Most memorably, The Economist put a picture of a starving Indian child on its cover and claimed that this was who was really being hurt by the protests. WTO chief Michael Moore got all choked up: “To those who would argue that we should stop our work, I say: Tell that to the poor, to the marginalized around the world who are looking to us to help them.”

  The recasting of the WTO, and of global capitalism itself, as a tragically misunderstood poverty elimination program is the single most off-putting legacy of the Battle in Seattle. To hear the line coming out of Geneva, barrier-free trade is a giant philanthropic plan, and multinational corporations are using their soaring shareholder returns and executive salaries only to disguise their real intentions: to heal the world’s sick, to raise the minimum wage and to save the trees.

  But nothing does a better job of giving the lie to this specious equation of humanitarian goals with deregulated trade than the track record of the World Bank and the IMF, who have exacerbated world poverty with a zealous and near-mystical faith in trickle-down economics.

  The World Bank has lent money to the poorest and most desperate nations to build economies based on foreign-owned megaprojects, cash-crop farming, low-wage export-driven manufacturing and speculative finance. These projects have been a boon to multinational mining, textile, and agribusiness companies around the world, but in many countries they have also led to environmental devastation, mass migration to urban centres, currency crashes and dead-end sweatshop jobs.

  Which is where the World Bank and IMF come in with their infamous bailouts, always with more conditions attached. In Haiti, it was a frozen minimum wage, in Thailand the elimination of restrictions on foreign ownership, in Mexico a hike in university fees was urged. And when these latest austerity measures fail once again to lead to sustainable economic growth, these countries are still on the hook for their layers of debts.

  As international attention turns to the World Bank and IMF this weekend, it will go a long way toward countering the argument that the protesters in Seattle were greedy North American protectionists, determined to keep the fruits of the economic boom to themselves. When union members and environmentalists took to the streets to complain about WTO interference in environmental and labour regulation, they weren’t trying to impose “our” standards on the developing world. They were playing catch-up with a movement for self-determination that began in the southern nations of the world, where the words “World Bank” are spat, not said, and where “IMF” is parodied on protest signs as short for “I M Fired.”

  After Seattle, it was relatively easy for the World Trade Organization to win the spin wars. So few people had even heard of the WTO before the protests that the organization’s claims were left mostly unchallenged. But the World Bank and the IMF are a different story: prod them even a little bit and all the skeletons come tumbling out of the closet. Usually the skeletons can only be seen in poor countries— crumbling schools and hospitals, farmers thrown off their land, overcrowded cities, toxic water systems. But this weekend all that changes; the skeletons are following the bankers home to head office, in Washington, D.C.

  AFTER

  Okay, I admit it: I slept in.

  I went to Washington for the protests against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but when my cellphone rang at some ungodly hour with word that the new plan was to meet at 4 A.M. on Monday, I just couldn’t do it.